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At the 2011 Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association, the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) Board voted unanimously to approve the move of the division’s professional journal, Reference & User Services Quarterly (RUSQ), to a solely online publication beginning in fall 2011. (more…)
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In this, my final column as RUSA President, I am taking some time to reflect on my career as a reference librarian. I guess you could say that I am probably in the declining years of my career. I am over fifty and have been a reference librarian since 1980—you do the math. (more…)
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.—Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, 1996
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Bill Gates could probably have used even more extreme adverbs. (more…)
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For many of us reference librarians, one of the greatest rewards we get from what we do is the immediate and direct feedback that we receive from our users. Because we help people, we are on the receiving end of their gratitude when we are able to give them what they want. (more…)
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I was born on November 4. I am an election baby. I was born on a Wednesday, but in the year I was born, there was not a U.S. general election. (more…)
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As I begin my first presidential column, I believe what is upmost on everyone’s mind is the state of the economy. (more…)
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It is somewhat traditional for RUSA presidents to focus their final “From the President” column on the future of RUSA and the profession. I think that the future of librarianship is, as ever, strong and exciting. (more…)
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RUSA is an oddity. Usually institutions fall into one of two categories: Either the sum of its parts is greater than the whole, or the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Think about Congress, the UN, or a car manufacturing line. In each case, either the total institution is more important than its parts, or the parts are what make the institution shakily hold together. (more…)
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Close to fifteen years ago some very bright people in RUSA decided to create a space where the most significant reference research of the year could be shared with RUSA members and other ALA Annual Conference attendees. (more…)
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Let’s do a little experiment. Before you read the rest of this article, go to your reference desk (or information desk, or help desk, or whatever term you use for your primary, in-person service point). Look around. What do you see? Are there people in the area? Are they staff or users? What are they doing? What library materials are they reading or using? What personal materials are they reading or using? Are they alone or in groups? Is it noisy or silent? (more…)
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Of course you are. If you are reading this column, you are most likely a college-educated, twenty-first-century information professional who is engaged in assisting members of your community navigate through, find, and understand complex information resources. This takes skills far beyond those of a fifth-grade education. So why am I asking? (more…)
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How has reference changed? I came to reference later in my career after attending library school in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At that time, I was still enough of an idealist to think that I would be supplying better reference service when I graduated even though I had already been teaching in a library instruction program for more than twenty years. (more…)
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As I put pen to paper to write this column (yes sometimes the ideas still start that way for me), the ghosts and goblins are at the door. Perhaps that’s not such a strange metaphor for this column because the idea of support staff certification is one that, like Halloween ghosts, has visited the American Library Association (ALA) in the past, only to disappear from view again and again. ALA has been discussing a certification program for library support staff for more than twenty years. (more…)
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Because I knew the goals of my Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) presidency would cluster around encouraging membership by new librarians, I took the opportunity as vice president of RUSA to appoint interns to all the RUSA-level committees and to nominate some for American Library Association-level (ALA) committees. My second column takes a peek at the people who filled these positions. (more…)
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In this column in the previous volume of Reference and User Services Quarterly (RUSQ), Diane Zabel, then-president of Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), took a look at the issues facing reference librarians as they plan for the future (more…)